


i'll waste my time (and i'll burn my mind)

by shuofthewind



Series: The Iron Lady [4]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Don't Fuck With Pepper Potts, F/F, Female Tony Stark, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Tony Has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Tony Stark & Peggy Carter - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-26 18:25:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3860080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Shut up, kid,” she tells him. “Let me work, or I’ll blow-torch your fingers off.”</p><p>He rolls his eyes at her instead of being scared, and perches on a stool to watch her work. </p><p>[Covers <em>Iron Man 3</em>.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'll waste my time (and i'll burn my mind)

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to finish the series before AOU came out, and I have succeeded! Sort of. Same day. Whatever.

It’s not the first time she wakes screaming, but it  _is_ the first time that she snaps awake flat on her back with Pepper in her Mark P fighting off one of her suits.

Toni shouts something unintelligible at JARVIS. The suit instantly turns off, falling to the floor like a child’s toy, pieces spinning off under the bed, beneath the dresser, tumbling against the window. Pepper’s thrusters sputter and die, and she hits the floor too. She tears the helmet off. It had been Toni’s idea to implant the trackers for the Mark P. Pepper hadn’t liked it, but she’d acceded. Toni rocks her head back against the floor, and lays a hand over her eyes.

“Fuck,” she says. It’s the only thing she can say, to be honest.

“Yeah.” Pepper’s voice is ice. “Fuck.”

*

Her nightmares have changed.

She still has the one about Yinsen, still sees him with his bloody necklace, the stones raining down around them, the flames as she burns the world to the ground. The whirling blue of the reactor. Now, when she’s tugged into its gravitation, pulled into its orbit, she falls through into space. She can’t breathe. The suit is crushing her. Everything is gone. She sees the space station explode, and she’s pierced through with stars.

Sometimes Yinsen turns into Obie. On those nights, she returns to the lab, picking at her new suits, scratching away with a mind that’s honed too thin, can’t do anything more than cut.

Sometimes she wakes up to find a blanket over her shoulders and coffee in a thermos on her desk. But more and more often lately, she doesn’t sleep at all.

*

The Mandarin means nothing to her, until he means everything.

She can hear Pepper talking somewhere in the distance, but she just stands. She stands and stares into Happy’s hospital room, where he’s lying bruised and broken on the mattress, and she _hates_. She thinks that she’ll turn all to hate, in that moment, vitriol and bile; she’ll turn into hydrochloric acid and melt through the floor and through the earth, burning everything that touches her.

She buys the whole of _Downton Abbey_ so far, and pays the nurses to have them play it on repeat in his room. Maybe that’ll wake him up.

*

She’s forgotten Aldrich Killian when she sees him at Stark Industries. He gives her a once-over, like her father’s business partners used to when she was fifteen. Then he turns and walks away, and she feels slighted, though she shouldn’t. She curses herself and turns back to talk to a security guard. She thinks, later, that she’s an idiot, but she’s met so many people in her life that she could populate a small country with them. She’s not sure it matters.

After all, she barely even remembers Maya Hansen, and she’s pretty sure she broke the woman’s orgasm record. (She’s still proud of that.)

*

She can remember her dad doing over-the-top, ostentatious, completely shallow bullshit to apologize to Maria when he did something wrong. Rather—when he did something that made Maria upset, which was _probably_ wrong, but he refused to admit it, and he just wanted to smooth it over.

Toni is not her father, but when Pepper looks at her like she’s breaking, she wants to buy the whole world to make it better, even though she can remember that look on Maria’s face too.

She already knows it won’t help anything. The hurt won’t go away. She doesn’t want it buried.

*

“I don’t remember you being this foolish as a child,” says Peggy in her hospice bed. She’s scowling. “I suppose that’s your father coming out in you.”

Toni tips her chair back. She hasn’t slept in three days, which is probably the only reason she thought it was a good idea to drop by the old folks’ home. She’s allergic to old people and baby powder. She can already feel the hives rising. “I’m not foolish, I’m awesome. In fact, I am _made_ of awesome. Don’t talk like a Brit.”

“I _am_ English, darling,” says Peggy with sweet venom. “As is your electronic butler.”

“Yeah, but JARVIS makes sure I get orange juice in the morning. You just judge me.”

“Sometimes it’s good to be judged.” Peggy lifts her eyes to the ceiling. “It’s the only way you start to improve.”

“Are you saying I’m not perfect?”

“I think you already know the answer to that.”

Toni drops her chair back to the floor again with a _thunk_. “You’re a horrible human being. You’re going to make me break out. Stress is bad for me, I get acne flare-ups, and my media consultant is going to hit me over the head with a razor blade. I’ll name you as the murderer. Write your name out in blood on the wall.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” says Peggy, and begins to cough. Toni gets her water. Then she gets the fuck out of the hospice.

Like she said. Old people. Hives. _Muy no bueno._

*

When she wakes up, she has no idea what the fuck has happened.

The suit is crumbling. She hits the ground with enough force to shake her teeth out of her skull, and JARVIS shatters around her head. Then he reforms himself. After they’ve slid to a stop, he says, “Oh, dear.”

Then he’s gone, and she’s terribly alone.

 _Mandarin_ , she thinks. She can remember the Mark P flying to Peggy’s defense, but she can’t remember the rest. She must have fallen. _Fuck me up the ass with a sandblaster._

“I hate you, JARVIS,” she tells the dead suit. Then she shimmies out of it (tank-top and booty shorts, _so_ not snow weather) and starts hunting around for a way to carry his dumb ass, because it’s the only way she’ll keep herself from imagining Pepper dead and crumpled on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.

*

Things Toni Stark hates with a fiery passion that will never be denied: children.

People have told her all her life that she’ll want them eventually. They’ve talked about her biological clock, her natural female instincts, the birds and the bees. She thinks children are the scum of the earth—shitty, shit-assed, snot-nosed, screaming ragdolls of incompetence and awkward stains, creatures that break your stuff and never pay you back for it, little monsters that wreck your life and keep you from even having one in the first place.

Which is why she’s irritated with herself for finding this manipulative little shit to be even somewhat endearing.

Current status: 94% irritation, 3% consideration, and 3% endearment.

It’s a ratio she’s willing to live with, so long as she has to be in this asscrack bumblefuck town.

“Shut up, kid,” she tells him. “Let me work, or I’ll blow-torch your fingers off.”

He rolls his eyes at her instead of being scared, and perches on a stool to watch her work.

She refuses to think that her dad might have felt the same way, once upon a time. She _refuses_.

*

She really fucking hates Extremis.

She hates the tang it leaves in the air, like rotting oranges, like fire. She hates the way it fucks with your DNA. Killian did a good fucking job with his serum or whatever the fuck it is, she has to admit that. The ferocious chemistry of it is intense, awe-inspiring, gut-wrenching. It rewrites the entirety of you, makes you different, makes you over new. But first, you must pass through the molten crucible.

She hears Pepper screaming, and imagines raking Aldrich Fucking Killian’s eyes out with her fingernails. She'll roll them like grapes, and serve them to him on a silver platter.

*

Miami sucks.

Toni avoids Florida for a reason. She hates the weather, hates the hurricanes. The cities feel like they’re falling down around their ears. Also, _CSI: Miami_ exists, and there is no reason to ever visit a place with a man named Horatio living in it.

She curses JARVIS and tells him to _hurry the fuck up_.

Real Jarvis was better than AI JARVIS, she thinks, glaring at the guards. One of them looks like he wants to touch her nipple ring. At least Edwin Jarvis knew how to keep to a motherfucking schedule.

*

She doesn’t know what happened, but Killian has Pepper. She doesn’t know if Pepper can reach the Mark P, doesn’t know if the suit is destroyed or kept powered down or whatever the fuck else, but she knows that Pepper is in pain and she can’t reach her. Pepper’s always in pain because of Toni, and Toni can never reach her.

She hits the wall of the Miami house, over and over again. Maya Hansen’s blood is still on the floor. Rhodey catches her fist, and folds his hand over it. Her knuckles catch against the calluses on his palms.

“Don’t be an idiot,” he says, sounding very Rhodey-ish. “Grow the fuck up, Stark.”

She bares her teeth at him. They’re bloody. One of the guards punched her in the face. _Lucky fucking shot._ “Like my dick?”

He lets go of her hand. “That sounds more like you.”

“I’m going to rip this bastard’s fucking balls off,” she says, and she glances back at the house where Maya Hansen’s body lies before turning away. “And then I’m going to feed them to him. His fingers, too. And his ears. And his eyes. Some _Princess Bride_ shit all up in this.”

“I don’t think that ever happened in the _Princess Bride_.”

Clearly, she thinks, Rhodey never read the book.

*

The president is an afterthought, and a vague one at that. She wonders if she’s a bad American for not keeping him at the forefront of her mind. Probably. Still: Toni Stark is bad at a lot of things (she’s probably worse at more things than she’s good at) so she doesn’t care overly much.

*

“So your dad left you,” she tells Harley that night in the snow. “So what? He doesn’t fucking matter. The people who leave never do. The best way you can show his ass up is be better than him, and that way no one will ever think of him again. They’ll only think of you.”

Harley gives her a long look, as if he’s seen something about her that he recognizes. Then he says, “Is that what you do?”

Toni opens her mouth, and then closes it again. For the first time she can remember, she doesn’t know what to say. That’s answer enough.

*

After the ship, she doesn’t gain new nightmares. Instead, they all fuse into one ending, Yinsin’s noose, Obie’s face, the stars, the reactor, and all of it turns into Pepper falling into flame.

Her dreams never get as far as the Mark P swooping out of nowhere to snatch her away from it. In her dreams, Pepper falls, and nothing Toni has ever done can save her.

She wakes screaming, and Pepper wraps her in warmth, in skin, in hair. It doesn't stop the dreams. 

*

She’s home again. Pepper is here, curled against her, shaking. She’s scorching to the touch, still stung all over with bruises from the Mark P and injection marks from the Extremis, and her fair skin is flaming, hot. Pepper heaves a little in her arms, like she’s going to be sick. She must love this woman, Toni thinks, because not even that will make her let go. “Not fair,” Toni says, but she can barely hear herself; she’s reveling in Pepper, the smell of her, the warmth, like a fever, like a dream. “You get a suit _and_ superpowers. I demand at least one, you are very threatening now.”

“Shut up,” Pepper says. Her voice cracks. “Shut up, you are very not helpful.”

“Super threatening. The most threatening. The most badass.” She kisses Pepper’s cheek, her jaw, the edge of her mouth. She is not going to cry. “Seriously, _so_ fucking badass, I wish someone had been filming, you beaned that motherfucker with a _pipe—_ ”

“We need self-defense classes.” Pepper hiccups, and her lungs heave again. She’s trying not to scream. “Self-defense. I want—kickboxing. And muay thai boxing. And—and actual boxing.”

“Ninja skills.” Toni presses her nose to Pepper’s bare collarbone. “The only redheaded ninja in America. You can get a plaque made.”

“You are not making me a plaque.”

“I’m so making you a plaque. JARVIS, order a plaque.”

“Belay that order, JARVIS.”

Toni’s voice closes up. She works her throat. Then she says, “JARVIS, initiate self-destruct protocol.”

The suits burst like pustules, like fireworks.

“Happy Christmas,” she says, the way Peggy Carter taught her to, and then both she and Pepper break down into ridiculous tears.

*

Pepper’s new office is very spartan, barely touched with anything personal, but there are three very important things inside.

The first is an epi-pen, filled with a temporary antidote to Extremis. Pepper’s elected to keep the powers—and the tracking beacons for the Mark P—but she doesn’t want to blow up Stark Tower, either. “I think fifteen percent of this one is mine,” she says, playing with Toni’s fingers. “Better than the Avengers Tower.”

“But the Avengers Tower has Jacuzzi bathtubs.”

“No, Toni.”

The second thing is the helmet of the first Mark P, battered, bruised. She keeps it on her windowsill like some kind of fucked up planter. It’s fucking creepy. Toni tells her so. Pepper doesn’t give a shit.

The third thing is a framed photograph from Peggy Carter’s eleventy-first birthday (or whatever the fuck it was, Toni doesn’t remember). Streamers and party-hats and a laughing Peggy Carter surrounded by Pepper Potts and Carter spawn. Toni’s in the corner, drinking tequila with a party hat tipped lopsidedly over her hair.

It’s a fucking awesome photo, but Toni will never admit it. She thinks that’s probably why Pepper keeps it.

She touches the raw, healing skin over her heart, where the reactor used to be. She does not smile.

“Hey, babe,” Toni says. “You ever think about being an Avenger?”

**Author's Note:**

> GUYS DR. FUMBLESMCSTUPID PODFICCED MY TONI SERIES I'M STILL SO HAPPY ABOUT IT. 
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/series/250876
> 
> AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
> 
> /coughs
> 
> I haven't seen AOU yet. I'll probably do one more _Iron Lady_ fic for that, and then mark it as finished until the next MCU with Tony comes out. Or, you know. Until the mood strikes.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic of] i'll waste my time (and i'll burn my mind)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11644968) by [Dr_Fumbles_McStupid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dr_Fumbles_McStupid/pseuds/Dr_Fumbles_McStupid)




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